Secrets of Iraq's death chamber

Prisoners are being summarily executed in the government's high-security detention centre in Baghdad.

Taken from The Independent, UK, Tuesday, 7 October 2008

By Robert Fisk

Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki's "democratic" government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein's old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced "democracy" to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq's death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable.

Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness.

"Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or another," a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah told me. "But hanging isn't easy." As always, the devil is in the detail.

"There's a cell with a bar below the ceiling with a rope over it and a bench on which the victim stands with his hands tied," a former British official, told me last week. "I've been in the cell, though it was always empty. But not long before I visited, they'd taken this guy there to hang him. They made him stand on the bench, put the rope round his neck and pushed him off. But he jumped on to the floor. He could stand up. So they shortened the length of the rope and got him back on the bench and pushed him off again. It didn't work."

There's nothing new in savage executions in the Middle East – in the Lebanese city of Sidon 10 years ago, a policeman had to hang on to the legs of a condemned man to throttle him after he failed to die on the noose – but in Baghdad, cruel death seems a speciality.

"They started digging into the floor beneath the bench so that the guy would drop far enough to snap his neck," the official said. "They dug up the tiles and the cement underneath. But that didn't work. He could still stand up when they pushed him off the bench. So they just took him to a corner of the cell and shot him in the head."

The condemned prisoners in Kazimiyah, a Shia district of Baghdad, are said to include rapists and murderers as well as insurgents. One prisoner, a Chechen, managed to escape from the jail with another man after a gun was smuggled to them. They shot two guards dead. The authorities had to call in the Americans to help them recapture the two. The Americans killed one and shot the Chechen in the leg. He refused medical assistance so his wound went gangrenous. In the end, the Iraqis had to operate and took all the bones out of his leg. By the time he met one Western visitor to the prison, "he was walking around on crutches with his boneless right leg slung over his shoulder".

In many cases, it seems, the Iraqis neither keep nor release any record of the true names of their captives or of the hanged prisoners. For years the Americans – in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad – did not know the identity of their prisoners. Here, for example, is new testimony given to The Independent by a former Western official to the Anglo-US Iraq Survey Group, which searched for the infamous but mythical weapons of mass destruction: "We would go to the interrogation rooms at Abu Ghraib and ask for a particular prisoner. After about 40 minutes, the Americans brought in this hooded guy, shuffling along, shackled hands and feet.

"They sat him on a chair in front of us and took off his hood. He had a big beard. We asked where he received his education. He repeatedly said 'Mosul'. Then he said he'd left school at 14 – remember, this guy is supposed to be a missile scientist. We said: 'We know you've got a PhD and went to the Sorbonne – we'd like you to help us with information about Saddam's missile project'. But I said to myself : 'This guy doesn't know anything 'bout fucking missiles.' Then it turned out he had a different name from the man we'd asked for, he'd been picked up on the road by the Americans four months earlier, he didn't know why. So we said to the Americans: 'Wrong gentleman!' So they put the shackles on him and took him back to his cell and after 20 or 30 minutes, they'd bring someone else. We'd ask him where he went to school and he told us he had never been to school.

"Wrong person again. It was a complete farce. The incompetence of the US military was astounding, criminal. Eventually, of course, they found the right guy and brought him in and took his hood off. He was breathing heavily, overweight, pudgy, disoriented, a little bit scared."

On this occasion, the Americans had found the right man. The British and American investigators asked the guards to remove the man's shackles, which they did – but then they tied one of the man's legs to the floor. Yes, he had a PhD.

Again, the official's testimony: "We went through his history, what he'd worked on – he was obviously just a minor functionary in one of Saddam's missile programmes. Iraqi scientists didn't have the knowledge how to make nuclear missiles nor did they have the financial support necessary. It just remained in the dreams of Saddam."


The scientist-prisoner in Abu Ghraib miserably told his captors that he'd been arrested by the Americans after they'd knocked on his front door in Baghdad and found two Kalashnikov rifles a woman's hijab, verses from the Koran and, obviously of interest to his captors, "physics and missile textbooks on his bookshelves." But this supposedly valuable prisoner was never charged or previously interviewed even though he admitted he was a rocket scientist.

"I don't know what happened to him," the former official told me. "I tried to tell the UK and the US military that we've arrested this man but that he's got a wife, children, a family. I said that by locking up this one innocent person, you've got 50 men radicalised overnight. No, I don't know what happened to him."

For many of the investigators working for the Anglo-American authorities in Baghdad, the trial for the crime for which the Iraqi dictator was himself subsequently hanged was a fearful experience that ultimately ended in disgust. Through captured documents, they could see the dark, inner workings of Saddam's secret police. The idea of the Saddam trial was less to bring members of the former regime to justice than to show Iraqis how justice and the rule of law should operate.

"It was exhilarating to see Saddam being cross-examined," one of the court investigators said. "The low point was when he was executed. What drove me on was seeing how Saddam dealt with his victims – I was looking at a microcosm of all the deaths that had taken place in Iraq. But when he was executed, it was done in such a savage way."

Saddam Hussein was hanged in the same "secure" unit at Kazimiyah where Mr al-Maliki's people, in an echo of Saddamite Baathist terror, now hang their victims.

Iraq The death penalty
* The death penalty in Iraq was suspended after Saddam Hussein was deposed in 2003. It was reinstated by the interim government in August 2004.
* The United Nations, the European Union and international human rights organisations all spoke out against the reintroduction.
* At the time, the government claimed the death penalty was a necessary measure until the country had stabilised. Amnesty International claims that "the extent of violence in Iraq has increased rather than diminished, clearly indicating that the death penalty has not proved to be an effective deterrent."
* Saddam, left, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar were hanged at the end of 2006 for their part in the killings of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of Dujail in 1982. Illicit videos of all three executions later became public. Saddam's body could be seen on a hospital trolley, his head twisted at 90 degrees. Barzan – Iraq's former intelligence chief –was decapitated by the noose. Officials said it was an accident.
* According to Amnesty, there were at least 33 executions reported in Iraq last year. About 200 people were estimated to have been sentenced to death.

Guantanamo release angers Bush

Taken from Al-Jazeera News Agency, Wednesday, October 08, 2008

A US judge has ordered the release of 17 Chinese Muslim detainees from the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in what has been seen as a rebuke to the Bush administration.

US district judge Ricardo Urbina said there was no evidence the men were a security risk and that the US constitution prohibits indefinite detention without cause.

Local Uighur residents and human rights activists cheered as he told a Washington courtroom the men, who have been in custody for almost seven years, should be freed.

The ruling is the first court-ordered release of Guantanamo detainees since the facility opened in 2002.

The Bush administration reacted with anger to the ruling, with a spokesman for the department of justice saying it presented "serious national security and separation of powers concerns and raises unprecedented legal issues".

The department said it would file an emergency request on Tuesday evening for a stay with the US court of appeals in Washington to halt the ruling.

If it loses, it has the option of appealing to the US Supreme Court, the highest in the country.

Lawyers 'thrilled'
Lawyers representing the men said they were "thrilled" with the decision.

"Justice has too long been delayed but today we saw a great judge give a principled and just decision," Sabin Willett, a lawyer for some of the men, told Reuters news agency.

The Uighurs, from the Xinjiang province in western China, had been living in a camp in Afghanistan during the US-led bombing campaign in the country that began in October 2001 after the September 11 attacks in the US.

They fled into the mountains and were detained by Pakistani authorities, who handed them over to the US.

The men have been cleared for release from Guantanamo since 2004 as they are no longer considered "enemy combatants", the official designation for those held in Guantanamo Bay, and would have been sent home.

However, the US has not been able to find a country willing to accept them.

Many Muslim Uighurs seek greater autonomy for the region and some want independence, however China has waged a relentless campaign against what it calls their violent separatist activities.

About 265 detainees are still held at Guantanamo, which was opened in 2002 to hold suspects captured during the US's so-called "war on terror" launched after the September 11 attacks.

Most have been held for years without being charged and some allege they have been abused or tortured.

'Your company is bankrupt, you keep $480m. Is that fair?'

Taken from the Guardian, UK, Tuesday October 7 2008

By Andrew Clark in New York and Elana Schor in Washington

It was a showdown to cherish for critics of Wall Street's culture of enrichment. The grim-faced boss of the bankrupt bank Lehman Brothers was left squirming yesterday as a veteran Democrat roasted him over his multimillion-dollar pay.

With the startled look of a man unaccustomed to sharp examination, Lehman chief executive Richard Fuld clashed bluntly with the chairman of the House oversight committee, Henry Waxman, on Capitol Hill.

Called on to explain why Lehman collapsed last month, Fuld began with a note of humility, saying he felt "horrible" over the demise of the 158-year-old institution. "I want to be very clear," Fuld said. "I take full responsibility for the decisions I made and for the actions I took."

In a brief speech which was heard in silence, Fuld told legislators that if he could turn back the clock he would do many things differently. As soon as he finished speaking, sparks began to fly.

The chairman of the committee held up a chart suggesting that Fuld's personal remuneration totalled $480m (£276m) over eight years, including payouts of $91m in 2001 and $89m in 2005.
"Your company is now bankrupt and our country is in a state of crisis," said Waxman, a liberal from California. "You get to keep $480m. I have a very basic question: Is that fair?"

After a long pause, Fuld said the figure was exaggerated: "The majority of my compensation, sir, came in stock. The vast majority of the stock I got I still owned at the point of our [bankruptcy] filing."

Waxman cut him off, saying that even if the figure was slightly lower, it was "unimaginable" to much of the public. "Is that fair, for a CEO of a company that's now bankrupt, to make that kind of money? It's just unimaginable to so many people."

"I would say to you the $500m number is not accurate," said Fuld. "I'd say to you, although it's still a large number, for the years you're talking about here, my cash compensation was close to $60m, which you've indicated here, and I took out closer to $250m [in shares]."

Interrupting again, Waxman listed Fuld's collection of property, including a $14m ocean-front villa in Florida and a home in an exclusive ski resort.

"You and your wife have an art collection filled with million dollar paintings," Waxman said.

"Your former president, Joe Gregory, used to travel to work in a helicopter."

A pugnacious congressman with a bald head and military moustache, Waxman warmed to his theme: "You made all this money taking risks with other people's money."

Refusing to give ground, Fuld said his pay had been set by an independent compensation committee which spent "a tremendous amount of time" making sure executives' interests were aligned with those of shareholders.

"When the company did well, we did well," Fuld said. "When the company did not do well, we didn't do well."

Waxman disagreed: "Mr Fuld, there seems to be a breakdown, because you did very well when the company was doing well and you did well when the company was not doing well. And now your shareholders who owned your company have nothing. They've been wiped out."

Fuld's evidence was his first public appearance since Lehman failed, sparking a chain of events which has sent shockwaves through the global financial system and prompted the US government to begin a $700bn bail-out of the banking sector.

A lifelong Lehman employee who joined the firm as an intern in 1966, Fuld has been blamed for the debacle by many of the bank's 28,000 staff - including those in London who have accused senior management of filleting Lehman's British operation of money in the bank's final days.

Deadpan and emotionless, Fuld repeatedly frustrated congressmen by answering questions with lengthy, technical financial explanations.

Frustrated by his demeanour, a Republican congressman, John Mica, tried humour: "If you haven't discovered your role, you're the villain today. You've got to act like a villain."

Fuld stared back wordlessly, without a shadow of a smile.

Nun dies after Hindu hardliners torch Christian churches and an orphanage

Taken from Daily Mail, UK, 25th August 2008

A nun has been killed and a priest seriously injured after Hindu hardliners set fire to an orphanage run by Christian missionaries.

The attack occurred in the village of Khuntapali, in India’s Orissa state, during protests against the murder of a Hindu religious leader on Saturday.

Police say tensions between the two groups have been growing in recent weeks, with some Hindu groups accusing the missionaries of bribing villagers to convert to Christianity.

Yesterday the religious fanatics converged on the orphanage and asked nearly 20 residents to leave the complex.

They then set the orphanage on fire with the nun and the priest locked inside.

The priest suffered extensive burns and was last night in a serious condition in hospital.

Although India’s constitution is secular, 84 per cent of its 1.2billion population is Hindu.

Around 2.5 per cent of Indians are Christians.

In the past Hindu extremists in Orissa state have attacked other Christian missionaries.

In 1999 an Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two sons were killed by a Hindu mob that set their car on fire.

Churches have denied that residents have been pressured or bribed to change their religious beliefs.

Indian law accepts missionaries but bars forced conversions. Nevertheless, any missionary activity generally provokes controversy.

Afghan president 'pardoned rapists'

Taken from the Independent, UK,
By Kate Clark in Kabulm, 24 August 2008

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has pardoned three men who had been found guilty of gang raping a woman in the northern province of Samangan.

The woman, Sara, and her family found out about the pardon only when they saw the rapists back in their village.

“Everyone was shocked,” said Sara’s husband, Dilawar, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “These were men who had been sentenced and found guilty by the Supreme Court, walking around freely.”

Sara’s case highlights concerns about the close relationship between the Afghan president and men accused of war crimes and human rights abuses.

The men were freed discreetly but the rape itself was public and brutal. It took place in September 2005, in the run up to Afghanistan’s first democratic parliamentary elections.

The most powerful local commander, Mawlawi Islam, was running for office despite being accused of scores of murders committed while he had been a mujahedeen commander in the 1980s and a Taliban governor in the 1990s, and since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Sara said one of his sub-commanders and body guards had been looking for young men to help in the election campaign.

“It was evening, around the time for the last prayer, when armed men came and took my son, Islamuddin, by force. I have eye-witness statements from nine people that he was there. From that night until now, my son has never been seen.”

Dilawar said his wife publicly harangued the commander twice about their missing son. After the second time, he said, they came for her. “The commander and three of his fighters came and took my wife out of our home and took her to their house about 200 metres away and, in front of these witnesses, raped her.”

Dilawar has a sheaf of legal papers, including a doctors’ report, which said she had a 17mm wound in her private parts cut with a bayonet. Sara was left to stumble home, bleeding and without her trousers.

When I met the couple in May 2006, they were in hiding and struggling to pursue the four men through the courts, petitioning the parliament, the president, human rights organisations and the United Nations. Sara and Dilawar say that one of the men involved in the attack used money and connections to repeatedly evade justice, particularly after his boss, Mawlawi Islam, became an MP and, they allege, was fully able to protect him.

In January 2007, Mawlawi Islam was assassinated. However, the other three men accused of the gang rape were put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Abdul Basir died in jail. The other two rapists, Nur Mohammad and Kheir Mohammad, were released last May. The commander was found not guilty.

A copy of the pardon was numbered, dated in May and appeared to bear the personal signature of Hamid Karzai. It recommended the men’s release because, it said, “they had been forced to confess to their crimes.”

When showed copies of the presidential pardon and court papers, President Karzai’s spokesman, Hamayun Hamidzada, was visibly shocked and said that if the documents proved genuine, Mr Karzai would be “upset and appalled.”

He said it was impossible that President Karzai could knowingly have signed a pardon for rapists, but refused to speculate on how the pardon could have come about. He promised an investigation into all aspects of the case, including the - as yet unsolved - mystery of Sara’s missing son.

He denied that there was one law for the rich and well-connected in Afghanistan and another for people like Sara. “There are difficulties - we’re rebuilding institutions, including our justice institutions and there are shortcomings, but the president and the government are committed to the rule of law on all equally.”

A UN human rights official said that, although she could not remember a similar case of the president giving a pardon in such a serious case, corruption in the police and courts was endemic.
The MP, Mir Ahmad Joyenda, said cases similar to Sara’s were actually becoming more common. The police and the courts, he said, were usually under the sway of local commanders.

“The commanders, the war criminals, still have armed groups,” he said. “They’re in the government. Karzai, the Americans, the British sit down with them. They have impunity.

They’ve become very courageous and can do whatever crimes they like.”

Sara and Dilawar are again in hiding, having felt too vulnerable to stay in their village. Dilawar was prepared to discuss the case. In Afghanistan, speaking about rape means risking further dishonour, but when asked whether he minded Sara’s story being publicised, Dilawar said, “We’ve already lost our son, our honour, we’ve sold our land to pay for legal costs and we’ve lost our home – what else can we lose?”

'Librarian' of global paedophile ring jailed

Taken from Daily Mirror, 18.08.2008

By Hannah Wood

This is the face of one of the bosses behind a worldwide internet paedophile ring smashed apart by UK cops in a massive undercover operation.

Twenty-seven year old Philip Thompson, who acted as the ‘librarian’ of the network that spanned 33 countries, was jailed today for three years nine months – but warned he could remain behind bars for much longer.

The self-taught British computer expert used his skills to moderate an invitation-only website forum that featured ‘borderline illegal’ images of children playing in their underwear.

Police said the gateway site was used to prove users had a perverted interest in children and once users were accepted as members they would then be linked up to other more secretive online environments.

It was here that thousands of more disturbing images and videos, as well as information about vulnerable children, were exchanged.

The capture of Thompson, of Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, has saved 15 children from the evil clutches of the vile paedophile ring and led to dozens more arrests, it has emerged.

Police have so far pinpointed 360 suspects involved in this global trade of child pornography, the court was told.

Thompson, who lived with his mother, pleaded guilty to 27 charges, including 16 counts of making indecent photographs of children, seven counts of distributing indecent photographs of children and one count of causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity.

Prosecutor Harry Hadfield told Teesside Crown Court that when cops raided the unemployed driver’s home in February this year they recovered two desktop computers and a laptop, as well as a selection of other computer paraphernalia.

Forensic analysis by computer experts established that the defendant had 241,000 indecent photographs of children, being one of the largest seizures of indecent photographs in the UK,’ he told the court.

Mr Hadfield said: “The defendant’s role was to police the website, which gave him the opportunity to transfer these images to his computer.

“The evidence recovered from his computer showed he had amassed a vast collection of indecent photographs of children.

“It appeared the defendant kept some of the most serious images to use as trading chips.”

Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Braithwaite, of Cleveland Police, said: “Thompson was a critical piece of this network. He was, essentially, the librarian for a myriad of images that were distributed to like-minded individuals both in this country and elsewhere.

“I hope this result acts as a deterrent and sends out a clear warning that activity such as this will not be tolerated.”

Of the near 250,000 images on Thompson’s computers, more than 3,000 were of levels four and five - the worst kind of child abuse images.

“The Crown would say that this collection of indecent photographs and the subsequent police investigation revealed that this defendant has been involved in the distribution of these photographs for the last four or five years,” Mr Hadfield said.

He added that 51 arrests had been made as a result of the investigation into Thompson and inquiries were continuing.

The international child abuse network was infiltrated by police in the largest deployment yet of undercover officers in the UK used in a child protection inquiry.

Detective Sergeant Becky Driscoll, of Cleveland Police, said Thompson thought he was operating ‘below the radar’.

“He was integral. He played a key role. He was trusted by others members of this site, so much so that he stored horrific images of child abuse on their behalf,” she said.

“He described the 250,000 child abuse images as his collection. He was prepared to share that with acquaintances he found on his forum.”

Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Ceop, added: “This website, whilst appearing to operate on the margins of legality, was clearly a front for the sinister, sexual abuse of children and an image trading ground for paedophiles.

“There is a simple message for those individuals like Thompson, who think they can go to this website - or indeed any space on the internet - and discuss their sexual interest in children and share images.

“You leave a digital footprint. We will track you down and hold you to account.”

Mary Dejevsky: Russia the bad guys? Who are the West trying to kid?

Taken from the Independent, UK
Friday, 15 August 2008

As Russian forces started to hand over control of the Georgian town of Gori yesterday, you could detect a note of surprise, even disappointment, in many media reports. So the all-out Russian invasion of plucky little democratic Georgia might not be going to happen after all. Could it be that the bear was drawing in his claws?

Well, Russia did not have long to worry about losing its reputation as backyard bully. Within hours, the United States envoy to Georgia was spinning a whole new myth to the BBC about how it was only decisive US intervention – by which he presumably meant the warplanes laden with humanitarian aid by then ostentatiously parked at Tbilisi airport – that the mighty erstwhile Red Army had been turned back.

The many Georgians who had counted on more timely and robust assistance from their US protector surely laughed a bitter laugh. But there were signs, with the arrival of the US Secretary of State in Georgia, that this version was gaining hold. The story of this war, it seems, will be that the US faced down a snarling, expansionist Russia, and forced it to limp back to its lair.

This is a travesty. But it is only the latest and most glaring in a series of Western misrepresentations and misreadings of Russian intentions throughout this sorry episode. They began with the repeated references to Russian "aggression" and "invasion", continued through charges of intended "regime change", and culminated in alarmist reports about Russian efforts to bomb the east-west energy pipeline. None of this, not one bit of it, is true.

Take "aggression" and "invasion". Georgia declared itself to be in a state of war with Russia.

War, regrettably, is war, and a basic objective is to reduce, or destroy, the enemy's military capability. This is what Russia was doing until it accepted the ceasefire. The positions it took up inside Georgia proper can be seen as defensive, not offensive. Gori houses the Georgian garrison on South Ossetia's border.

And anyway, how did hostilities begin? Georgia sent troops into South Ossetia. The status of that region – which declared unilateral independence – is anomalous. It is inside Georgia's borders, but outside its control. But one reason why the dispute has not been solved is that the "fudge" over independence brought with it a degree of stability. Georgia's action upset that stability. But did anyone describe it as "aggression"? Trying to explain Russian "aggression", many reports went further, observing a "new" mood of Russian aggressive nationalism. Today's Russia, they reasoned, was uniquely liable to lash out, because energy wealth had fuelled new national ambitions. Where, though, is the evidence that Russian national pride is automatically malign?

If you exclude Chechnya, which Russians have always regarded as part of Russia, then neither Putin, nor Medvedev, had sent troops outside Russian borders before this point. As for the idea that Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union – derived from his remark about the Soviet collapse being "among the greatest catastrophes" of the 20th century – nothing could be further from what he did. Far from hankering after a lost empire, Putin used his years as president systematically to fix Russia's post-Soviet borders, signing treaties with every neighbouring country that would agree – including, last month, China. Of course, Russia does not like the idea of another Nato member on its borders. But this is not the same as wanting to restore "ex-Soviet space". It reflects Russia's view of its legitimate security interests.

Perhaps the most pernicious assumption over the past week, however, is that Russia wanted to effect "regime-change". Russian officials categorically denied this, insisting that they had no business overthrowing an elected leader. You might scoff, but Russia has done nothing that would contradict this. The Kremlin would probably be delighted if Georgians eventually punished their President for his misguided enterprise, but Russia seems to accept that Georgians decide what happens in Georgia.

Why was it so difficult for outsiders to believe that Moscow wanted precisely what its leaders said they wanted: a return to the situation that had pertained before Georgia's incursion into South Ossetia – and does it matter that its intentions were so appallingly misread? Yes it does. If outsiders impute to Moscow motives and objectives it does not have, they alienate Russia even further, and make a long-term solution of many international problems that more difficult. It is high time we treated Russia's post-Soviet leaders as responsible adults representing a legitimate national interest, rather than assuming the stereotypical worst.

UNIFIL commander: Israel violating 1701

Taken from The Jerusalem Post, Aug 15, 2008

Commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Maj.-Gen. Claudio Graziano on Thursday accused Israel of violating UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that brought an end to the Second Lebanon War.

During a press conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Graziano cited the IAF forays over Lebanon and the village of Ghajar, which he called "a permanent violation of 1701" and "a permanent area under occupation."

A further violation, according to Graziano, was Israel's failure to provide maps of all the locations where it dropped cluster bombs during the 2006 war.

In contrast, he said that the UN enjoyed excellent cooperation with Hizbullah and with the local Lebanese people.

"At this moment Hizbullah is one of [the] parties that agrees with 1701," he stressed.

Graziano asserted that apart from UN troops, Lebanese soldiers and hunters, no one was armed south of the Litani River.

"We have seen hunters, we saw somebody moving with one weapon and he was arrested, but we never met anybody [else] moving with weapons," he said.

He conceded that his soldiers were not trying to prevent weapons smuggling from Syria as demanded by the UNSC because the Lebanese government had not requested such action.

The UNIFIL commander emphasized that Israel's numerous allegations regarding violations of the UN resolution were being investigated.

Iraq contractors 'cost US $85bn'

Taken from Al-Jazeera News Agency, 13 Aug 2008

The US government has spent at least $85 billion on private contractors during the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath, a government review has said.

About 20 per cent of money spent for operations in Iraq has gone to contractors, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said.

At present there are at least 190,000 contractors in Iraq and in neighbouring countries, a ratio of about one per US service member, the report said.

The report sparked heavy criticism by US Democrats, with Senator Kent Conrad, chairman of the US senate budget committee, saying the reliance on contractors "restricts accountability and oversight; opens the door to corruption and abuse and ... may significantly increase the cost to American taxpayers".

The study did not include figures for 2008 and therefore the total paid tocontractors for work in Iraq since the invasion could be even higher, possibly topping $100 billion by the end of this year, the report said.

The US military has relied increasingly on contractors in its wars as it reduced the size of its own forces.

Increased scrutiny
The CBO estimated on Tuesday that between $6 billion to $10 billion has gone to pay for security work in Iraq, which was comparable to the costs of having a US military unit performing the same tasks.

The work of contractors in Iraq - of whom between 25,000 to 30,000 are in security work - has faced increased scrutiny following a series of fatal incidents involving Iraqi civilians.

Last September, 17 Iraqis were killed in a shooting involving contractors from Blackwater security company, an incident that provoked furious protests from the Iraqi government and strained relations with the US.

The US Justice Department is expected to decide soon whether to bring charges over the incident, although Blackwater itself is not expected to be prosecuted.

The firm recently announced that they planned to scale back their securitycontracting business and focus on other areas, due in part to negative publicity from the shooting.

In addition, contracting companies such as Halliburton, previously run by Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, and KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, have also been accused of overcharging and corruption.

Charles Tiefer, a professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore Law School, told the New York Times newspaper that the scale of contractor usage in Iraq was

"unprecedented".
"It was considered an all-out imperative by the administration to keep troop levels low, particularly in the beginning of the war, and one way that was done was to shift money and manpower to contractors," he told the paper.

"But that has exposed the military to greater risks from contractor waste and abuse."

Israeli troops kill West Bank boy

Taken from Al-Jezeera News Agency, Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Israeli troops have shot dead a Palestinian boy during a protest near the separation wall in the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian medics and witnesses.

Hammad Hossam Mussa was hit by a bullet fired by Israeli soldiers in the village of Ni'lin on Tuesday, Salah Al Khawaja, a member of Ni'lin's Committee Against the Wall, said.





He died of his wounds while being transported to hospital in an ambulance, medical sources said.
Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland in Jerusalem said that the Israeli military had not yet given a definitive account of the incident.

"They have merely told us that they are carrying out 'a careful and thorough investigation' into how this child died, and only once they have done that investigation will we get their comment on how this boy happened to die," she said.

Live rounds

According to Khawaja, soldiers fired live rounds towards a group of protesters who had run into the village after the army dispersed protesters outside using rubber-coated bullets.

"Protesters arrived at the wall's construction site outside the village and the soldiers started to open fire with rubber bullets and tear gas. This pushed the protesters back into the village where the boy was hit by a live bullet in his chest," he told AFP.

However, other witnesses said that the boy was hit in the head as strone-throwers confronted Israeli troops.

Fifteen people were also lightly injured by rubber-coated bullets during the demonstration in Ni'lin, which has in recent months become the site of regular demonstrations against the barrier.

"This barrier, made of coiled razor wire, deep trenches and a fence equipped with electronic sensors, is cutting through the land of the village," Rowland reported.

Earlier this month, demonstrators in Ni'lin and other locations marked four years since the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding resolution calling for parts of the barrier inside the West Bank to be torn down and for a halt to construction there.

Israel has largely ignored the ruling.

Hunt for Karadzic ends as fugitive is found

Taken from the Independent, UK, 22/07/2008

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade

After a 13-year hunt Radovan Karadzic, the man accused of masterminding the Srebrenica massacre, has finally been arrested in Serbia.

It was a momentous arrest that brought to mind the capture of Saddam Hussein. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him." They were the words of Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Iraq, on the capture of the former Iraqi leader. But they could equally apply to last night's triumphant announcement that the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had finally been run to ground by Serbian security forces.

Karadzic, wanted by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for genocide, has eluded the world's best-equipped armies since the end of the Bosnian war in 1995 and topped the list of the UN war crimes court for former Yugoslavia. His co-indictee, the Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic, remains at large, however.

The pair are accused of masterminding the massacre of more than 7,500 Muslim men and boys in the "safe haven" of Srebrenica in July 1995. It was the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of the Second World War. They are also indicted for the siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, that lasted for three-and-half years and left 10,000 people dead.

Karadzic, 64, has been handed over to the war crimes section of Belgrade County Court, pending his extradition to The Hague, in The Netherlands. No details were released last night on the circumstances of the arrest which was announced by the Serbian president's office.

The arrest, a milestone for Serbia, which had been accused of shielding the pair for more than a decade, sets the Balkans country firmly on the road to European Union membership under the new pro-European government there. The arrest of Karadzic and other indicted war criminals is a key condition posed by the EU for membership.

The news was greeted with euphoria across Europe, and welcomed by the UN War Crimes Prosecutor for the Former Yugoslavia and by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which had launched a number of unsuccessful raids on Karadzic's presumed hideouts in recent years.

The EU said the arrest "illustrates the commitment of the new Belgrade government to contributing to peace and stability in the Balkans region".

A statement from the EU presidency, currently held by France, said the arrest was "an important step on the path to the rapprochement of Serbia with the European Union". The issue of Serbian membership is expected to be discussed by EU foreign ministers in Brussels today.

Richard Holbrooke, a former US assistant secretary of state for Europe who negotiated the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war, welcomed his capture, describing him as the Osama bin Laden of Europe, "a real, true architect of mass murder".

In Britain, the shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, also welcomed the arrest but pointed out that the fractured country of Bosnia would only obtain closure once Mladic, too, had been sent to The Hague. The leader accused of being the architect of the Balkan wars, Slobodan Milosevic, died in The Hague in 2006 while fighting war crimes charges.

Many in Serbia, however, will be more circumspect about Mr Karadzic's arrest, which took place only weeks after the new government took power under President Boris Tadic, suspecting a deal had been brokered. For many Serbs, Karadzic is still a hero of the Bosnian conflict, which left more than 100,000 dead, mostly non-Serbs. More than 1.8 million people were forced to leave their homes and many remain displaced.

Karadzic, a psychiatrist by training, went into hiding only a year after the war in Bosnia had ended with the Dayton accords.

It is widely believed that he used the sanctuaries of Orthodox monasteries in the border region of eastern Bosnia and Montenegro for years. He is also said to have resorted to elaborate disguises, such as posing as a priest by shaving off his trademark silver mane and donning a brown cassock, to elude authorities.


Karadzic in disguise that eluded everyobe for many years

While in hiding, he published five books – poetry and novels – widely publicised by his supporters. The former UN prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia, Carla del Ponte, openly accused successive Serbian governments of shielding Karadzic. She also said that Mladic could be arrested if the "political will" were present. Attempts to reach Karadzic through his family, through regular searches at their homes in Pale, once the stronghold of Bosnian Serbs, were in vain. He did not react to an appeal by his wife, Ljiljana, in 2005, who begged him to surrender saying the family could no longer "live under pressure." Karadzic has a daughter, Sonja, and son, Sasa with Ljiljana,

Additional reporting by Anne Penketh

13-year search
*Radovan Karadzic has been one of the world's most wanted men since 1995. Before last night's arrest, sightings of Karadzic were rare, but in 2004 he published a book, Miraculous Chronicles Of The Night. Pressure to capture him mounted in 2005 after several of his ex-generals gave themselves up, and a video showing Bosnian-Serb soldiers shooting captives from Srebrenica was shown at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. In 2007, the homes of Karadzic's two children were raided by Nato troops, who suspected they were supporting him.





Ratko Mladic Bosnian Serb military commander whispers to Karadzic. Both are accused of masterminding the massacre of more than 7,500 Muslim men and boys in the 'Safe Haven' of Srebrenica in July 1995


Muslim refugees ride a United Nations truck as they flee the Serb-besieged Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica for Tuzla in March 1993


Forensic experts examine remains of the bodies after removing layers of soil from a massgrave near eastern Bosnian town of Zvornik, 28 July 2003. The massgrave is thought to contain several hundred bodies of Bosnian Muslims, killed in 1995 Srebrenica massacre and others killed in Zvornik at the beginning of war


Stacks of unidentified corpses line the walls of an underground shelter at a Bosnian morgue in Tuzla. The bags contain victims found in mass graves after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre


A Bosnian woman weeps next to the coffins of Muslim men and boys before their burial in Potocari, near Srebrenica, 11 July 2004. The identified remains of 338 Muslim men, aged from 15 to 70, were buried in a common funeral, marking the ninth anniversary of the massacre of Srebrenica

Report: Israeli jets flying over Iraqi territory in preparation for strike on Iran

Taken from YnetNews, Israel, 11.07.2008

Sources in Iraq's Defense Ministry say for past month Israel using American bases to conduct overflights as part of rehearsal for possible bombing or Iranian nuclear facilities




Israeli fighter jets have been flying over Iraqi territory for over a month in preparation for potential strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, sources in the Iraqi Defense Ministry told a local news network Friday, adding that the aircraft have been landing in American bases following the overflights.

Word of Israel's alleged Air Force maneuvers in Iraq has reached Iran. The sources said the US has boosted security in and around the bases used by Israel during the exercises.

According to the Defense Ministry officials, retired Iraqi army officers in the Al Anbar district reported that fighter jets have been regularly entering Iraqi airspace from Jordan and landing at the airport near Haditha.

The sources estimated that should the Israeli jets take off from the American bases it would take them no more than five minutes to reach Iran's nuclear reactor in Bushehr.American officials said recently that more than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters took part in maneuvers over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece in the first week of June, apparently a rehearsal for a potential bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities.

Oil giants return to Iraq

Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total set to sign deal with Baghdad

Taken from The Independent, UK, Friday 20 June 2008
By Patrick Cockburn

Nearly four decades after the four biggest Western oil companies were expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein, they are negotiating their return. By the end of the month, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total will sign agreements with the Baghdad government, Iraq's first with big Western oil firms since the US-led invasion in 2003.

The deals are for repair and technical support in some of the country's largest oilfields, the Oil Ministry in Baghdad said yesterday. The return of "Big Oil" will add to the suspicions of those in the Middle East who claimed that the overthrow of Saddam was secretly driven by the West's desire to gain control of Iraq's oil. It will also be greeted with dismay by many Iraqis who fear losing control of their vast oil reserves.

Iraq's reserves are believed to be second only to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, but their exploitation has long been hampered by UN sanctions, imposed on Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.

The major oil companies have been eager to go back to Iraq, but are concerned about their own security and the long-term stability of the country. The two-year no-bid agreements are service agreements that should add another 500,000 barrels of crude a day of output to Iraq's present production of 2.5 million barrels a day (b/d).

The companies have the option of being paid in cash or crude oil for the deals, each of which will reportedly be worth $500m (£250m). For Iraq, the agreements are a way of accessing foreign expertise immediately, before the Iraqi parliament passes a controversial new hydrocarbons law.

But they mean that the four oil companies, which originally formed the Iraq Petroleum Company to exploit Iraqi oil from the 1920s until the industry's nationalisation in 1972, will be well-placed to bid for contracts for the long-term development of these fields. The oilfields affected are some of the largest in Iraq, from Kirkuk in the north to Rumaila, on the border with Kuwait. Although there is oil in northern Iraq, most of the reserves are close to Basra, in the far south.

Since the US invasion, Iraqis have been wary of foreign involvement in their oil industry. Many are convinced that the hidden purpose of the US invasion was to take over Iraqi oil, but the Iraqi Oil Minister, Hussein Shahristani, has said that Iraq will hold on to its natural resources. "If Iraq needs help from international oil companies, they will be invited to co-operate with the Iraqi National Oil Company [Inoc], on terms and conditions acceptable to Iraq, to generate the highest revenue for Iraq".

Inoc's technical expertise has deteriorated sharply during the long years of sanctions. Iraq is currently exporting 2.1 million b/d and is expecting to have oil revenues of $70bn this year, but its government administration is too dysfunctional and corrupt to rebuild the electricity or water supply systems. The government has $50bn in the Federal Bank of New York.

Mr Shahristani has been highly critical of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for auctioning off oil concessions in Iraqi Kurdistan without reference to the oil ministry in Baghdad.

In an interview with The Independent last year, he said Inoc would never do business with any oil company that signed up with the KRG, and he also doubted if the oil could be exported without pipelines. "Are they going to carry it out in buckets?" he asked.

Several of the small oil companies who have signed contracts in Kurdistan are hoping that in the long term there will be an agreement between the Kurds and the central government and they will then sell out to the majors at a large profit.

The technical support agreements, as the service agreements are known, may open the door to Iraq for the majors. Mr Shahristani has said that Iraq will open up the same fields for bidding for long-term development projects soon. "We're going to announce the first licensing round by the end of this month or early next month," he said.

The high price of oil means that Iraq is not under immediate pressure to maximise its oil revenues. The Iraqi parliament has suspected anything which looks like giving foreign companies ownership of Iraq's oil through a production sharing agreement.

The nationalisation of Iraq's oil is one the few acts of Saddam Hussein's long years in power which is still highly popular, and Iraqi members of parliament are fearful of anything that looks like back-door privatisation in the interests of foreigners.

Big four have history of control
For the four oil giants, the new agreements will bring them back to a country where they have a long history. BP, Exxon Mobil, Total and Shell were co-owners of a British, American and French consortium that kept Iraq's oil reserves in foreign control for more than 40 years.

The Iraq Petroleum Company (once the Turkish Petroleum Company) was formed in 1912 by oil companies eager to grab the resources in parts of the Ottoman Empire.

The company was formalised in 1928 and each of the four shareholders had a 23.75 per cent share of all the oil produced. The final 5 per cent went to Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian businessman.

In 1931, an agreement was signed with Iraq, giving the company complete control over the oi fields of Mosul in return for annual royalties. After Saddam's coup in 1958, nationalisation came in 1972.

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It's sad to see a country that was only a decade ago was one of the most advanced economies in the Arab world with women entitled freedoms like being able to work, go to school, being destroyed for the sake of oil and oil supply. Most people knew from the begining that the war in Iraq was about Oil and gaining control of the Middle East - in September 2007, Alan Greenspan a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, said in his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” a few months earlier the Australian Defence Minister admitted his country's troops are in Iraq to secure oil interests. Brendan Nelson is believed to be the first government minister from any country with forces in Iraq to publicly admit oil was a key factor in their presence. 'Obviously the Middle itself, not only Iraq but the entire reason, is an important supplier of energy, oil in particulary, to the rest of the world,' he told a radio programme. He said Australian forces were there for 'resource security'. Yes, we depend on the oil from the Middle East, yet we spend billions of developing weapons or sending people to the moon when this money could be used to investigate alternative fuels. You have to ask why this has not happened.

'Shopped' son faces jail over gun

Taken from ITN, UK
20/06/2008

A teenager whose father called the police after finding a gun and bullets in his bedroom faces jail when he is sentenced later.

Paul Metcalfe, 19, from Nelson, Lancashire, pleaded guilty to possession of 11 cartridges and a blank firing handgun, converted to fire real bullets.

Despite being shopped by his 45-year-old father Neil, Metcalfe has forgiven him, believing it was the right thing to do.

He said: "Although I'm scared of going to prison, I feel dad saved me. I was angry with him at the time. Now I know why he did it and respect him for it."

Mr Metcalfe said: "How would you feel if you hadn't done that and then you came back home and found your son with a bullet hole in his head?

"You just have to realise that these are weapons - they are dangerous."

Metcalfe was "minding" the bullets and gun for another, unidentified individual, who has not been named, Burnley Crown Court was told.

He showed the ammunition to his sister's boyfriend and a neighbour - who told his father, who was living at another house after splitting from Metcalfe's mother.

When Mr Metcalfe went round to investigate, he found the bullets wrapped in a plastic bag on top of an airing cupboard.

"Sick with worry", Mr Metcalfe called police who then also found the gun hidden in a sofa bed and Metcalfe was arrested.

He told officers he was "looking after it" - after being put under pressure to do so, the court heard.

Metcalfe has not told police who it belongs to.

Possession of a handgun carries a mandatory five year jail term - but Metcalfe's lawyer, Hugh Barton, pleaded with Judge Christopher Cornwall to make an exception.

He said the five-year minimum term was "purely deterrent" but in this case it would not be a deterrent because Metcalfe has learnt his lesson.

Metcalfe has no previous convictions and was put under pressure and intimidated into minding the weapon, Mr Barton said.

In such a case five years would be "arbitrary and disproportionate", he added.

And he said a five-year term for Metcalfe could actually deter other people from informing police on their loved ones if they found a firearm belonging to their son or father.

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This is brilliant news that parents are taking the correct steps to not only protect their children but society. Only a few days earlier twin girls shopped their drunk mum after she nearly drove into their house. A breath test revealed she was about two and a half times the drinkdrive limit - 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath. Cox at first denied drink driving but changed her plea when she realised her girls would testify against her at Barnsley magistrates' court in South Yorks. So all round great news,we need more people to speak out and stop the disese that is ruining our society.

‘Vultures’ expose corruption

Hedge funds lift the lid on African deception

Taken from The Sunday Times, June 15, 2008
By Tony Allen-Mills

ON a spring morning in Paris three years ago, a young African oil executive went on a shopping spree. He spent £1,600 at Escada on the Avenue Montaigne, and £3,700 a few doors down at Christian Lacroix. A couple of weeks later he spent £4,000 at Ermenegildo Zegna and £3,200 at Louis Vuitton.

By the end of 2005, Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso had charged more than £112,000 to his personal Hong Kong-issued credit card, up from £64,000 the previous year.

Last August Mr Justice Stanley Burnton dismissed an attempt by Sassou-Nguesso in the High Court to suppress publication of his credit card bills. Last month he lost a related action in Hong Kong.

So why is Sassou-Nguesso such an embarrassment for several prominent British and French companies – not to mention the celebrities and politicians, among them Gordon Brown, who have argued so vociferously for poor African countries to be forgiven their international debts?

The answer has all the elements of a detective novel, complete with straw men, false noses, hidden bank accounts, and American bankers who have been derided as “vultures”, but who have managed to find out more about corruption in Africa than Scotland Yard and the FBI.

It is a story that leads from the oil-rich coast of western Africa to the gas-guzzling consumers of America and Europe, via a trail of government fraud and corporate deceit that successive UK judges have publicly condemned.

It starts with Sassou-Nguesso, the son of Denis Sassou-Nguesso, president of the Republic of the
Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries. Two-thirds of Congolese people subsist on less than 50p a day.

The Sassou-Nguessos are no strangers to allegations of profligate spending. Their country, also known as Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from the bigger adjacent Democratic Republic of Congo, controls Africa’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves. It pumps crude at about 235,000 barrels a day, worth £5.8 billion a year at today’s record prices.

When Sassou-Nguesso senior visited New York for a recent United Nations summit, bottles of Kristal champagne popped as his entourage ran up a hotel bill of £169,000 – of which £100,000 was paid in cash. Yet he repeatedly claims his country is too poor to pay off its debts.

In May last year, when he was still chancellor, Gordon Brown said he was shocked that poor African countries were being pursued by international hedge-fund creditors seeking to turn a profit on old debt they had bought at a discount.

Brown demanded international action to protect Africans from so-called “vulture funds” whose pursuit of highly indebted countries was, he said, “nothing short of scandalous”.

It was a theme close to the heart of Bono, Bob Geldof and other anti-poverty campaigners who have turned African debt relief into a popular cause.

When Danny Glover, the Hollywood actor and activist, testified before Congress last year, he urged the American government to “follow the example of Gordon Brown . . . to stop vulture funds from devouring African economic progress”.

Yet the case of Congo-Brazzaville and its free-spending rulers offers a radically different perspective on debt relief, and who, exactly, is responsible for obstructing economic progress.

Earlier this year, in a little-noticed, out-of-court settlement, the Brazzaville government paid off its “vulture” creditors, thereby ending almost a decade of legal wrangling that stretched from Bermuda and the Virgin Islands via Paris, New York and Hong Kong to London’s High Court.

It was a startling surrender for a country that has spent much of the past 10 years dodging its creditors, ignoring court orders and pleading to join the debt-relief programme run by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Why give in to the vultures just as world opinion had clearly turned against the hedge funds?

My search for an answer started on the 35th floor of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper in mid-town Manhattan. This is the headquarters of Elliott Associates, a $10 billion (£5 billion) hedge fund that specialises in so-called “distressed” debt – the packages of national and corporate loans turned bad that are routinely sold by banks trying to tidy up their balance sheets.

“Our approach has always been to look for countries with a good prospect of re-negotiating debt,” Jay Newman, a senior Elliott portfolio manager, told me in the company boardroom overlooking Central Park. “We do not acquire the debt of countries that have no means to pay.”

In the late 1990s, an Elliott subsidiary named Kensington International purchased several packages of overdue Congo debt with a collective value of about $100m. It was a perfectly legal transaction and Kensington swiftly won a series of judgments in British and other courts ordering Brazzaville to pay up. The hedge fund’s attempts to initiate negotiations were ignored.

Thus began a game of cat-and-mouse across the world as Elliott’s team of private detectives and forensic accountants attempted to identify shipments of Congolese oil that might be seized and sold to repay the outstanding debts.

Armed with court-approved powers to subpoena witnesses and with search warrants, the Elliott team began a journey into the murky depths of the international oil trade. It would subsequently emerge in court that the Brazzaville government had established a network of sham companies (known in French as faux nez, or “false noses”) and bogus executives (“straw men”) in the hope of concealing their oil transactions.

The breakthrough came in 2005, when Elliott detectives discovered two consignments of Congo oil had been loaded on a vessel called the Nordic Hawk for sale to Glencore, a British company set up by Marc Rich, the Swiss-based trader. Glencore intended to sell the oil on to BP in what should have appeared as a standard and un-noteworthy industry transaction.

Kensington promptly applied to the High Court in London for injunctions to seize the proceeds of the Nordic Hawk consignments on the grounds they were fraudulently concealed sales by the Brazzaville government.

The transcript of Mr Justice Cook’s ruling, among hundreds of court documents reviewed by The Sunday Times, found that Denis Gokana, the head of the national Congo oil company SNPC, had set up a series of front companies and was in effect selling Congo’s oil to himself to disguise its true origins.

Somewhere along the way millions of dollars went missing, and the judge noted that an examination of the bank statements of one of Gokana’s companies “reveals that there was virtually no connection between the cash passing through its bank accounts and the sums it should have received for the oil it sold”.

Where the money went remains a mystery.

Critics of vulture funds say the pursuit of African debtors forces them to resort to unconventional measures to protect sovereign assets. Oxfam is among the charities to denounce vulture funds for “profiting from poverty”.

Undeterred by the “vulture” slurs, Elliott identified a new target. It decided to go after the middlemen. In 2005, Kensington filed a civil suit against BNP Paribas, the French bank, accusing it of conspiring with the SNPC “to divert oil revenues from the Republic of Congo into the pockets of powerful Congolese public officials, while at the same time protecting both the oil and oil revenues from seizure by legitimate creditors”.

BNP denied that its banking arrangements with the Congo were anything other than routine, but a New York judge rejected the company’s motion to have charges dismissed. The case was ultimately dropped as part of the settlement between Elliott and Brazzaville.

Kensington also went back to court in London, where it was attempting to obtain information and documents concerning a related pair of British companies, Vitol Services and Vitol Broking, and their dealings with Congo.

Elliott’s investigators had established that the Vitol companies had made substantial payments to Hong Kong accounts controlled by prominent Congo oil executives. Among them was Denis Christel, the president’s son, who was also head of Cotrade, SNPC’s trading arm.

Kensington argued before Mr Justice Gross of the UK commercial court in January 2007 that “the only credible explanations for these payments are that either they were made to assist Congo in hiding its assets, or they were made as corrupt kickbacks in return for valuable business”.

Vitol promptly startled the oil world by pleading the British equivalent of the Fifth Amendment – it did not want to testify for fear of incriminating itself.

The judge ultimately rejected the Vitol claim, and the case went to appeal. Despite extensive allegations of bribery and corruption detailed in court, no British police investigation has been launched. The Vitol case has also been dropped as a result of the Elliott settlement.

At first, Sassou-Nguesso shrugged off Elliott’s attempts to seize Congo’s assets. “If this is not robbery, what is?” the president once complained to Fortune magazine.

“Who is stealing from the poor?” He dismissed the hedge funds as “snakes in the ocean” and “thug gangsters” who hid in Caribbean tax havens.

Then Elliott’s trail led to Hong Kong, and to Denis Christel’s credit-card receipts.

These first surfaced publicly on the website of Global Witness, a London-based anti-corruption pressure group that has long been monitoring Congo. The group claimed in a 2005 report that the country’s main economic asset “has for too long been managed for the private profit of the elite rather than for the benefit of its entire population”.

The documents produced by Global Witness purported to show that at least part of Denis Christel’s personal expenditure had been paid for by an offshore company he controlled, Long Beach. The same company had received payments from sham oil companies set up by Gokana.

When Sassou-Nguesso went to court in London in August to make Global Witness remove the documents from its site, Mr Justice Burnton noted “it is an obvious possible inference that his expenditure has been financed by secret personal profits made out of dealings in oil sold by Cotrade. The profits of Cotrade’s oil sales should go to the people of the Congo, not to those who rule it or their families”.

The judge declined to suppress the documents. He concluded: “Once there is a good reason to doubt the propriety of the financial affairs of a public official, there is a public interest in those affairs being open to public scrutiny.”

Attempts to obtain a comment from the Brazzaville government were unsuccessful last week, but the president must have realised the spotlight on his family’s private affairs wasn’t going away.

The publication of the Hong Kong credit-card bills “made them get serious” about negotiating a settlement, a source familiar with the case said.

The terms of the settlement prevent Newman from providing details, but the question arises: Did the hedge fund really make a profit after all those years of expensive sleuthing around the globe?

In a newspaper article describing the Nordic Hawk affair, Newman likened the pursuit of Congo’s oil revenues to “a magical mystery tour”.

He said: “Far from being under control, as Bono and [others] would have us believe, corruption in Africa is out of control.

“Seasoned Third World bosses like President Sassou-Nguesso know all too well how to manipulate soft-hearted campus sensibilities and dysfunctional international financial institutions like the IMF.”

Last week Newman declined to address the profit issue, but had no regrets about his company’s approach. “It’s about the rule of law,” he said.

In the course of its near-decade-long pursuit of Congo, Elliott has probably done more than any other national or corporate entity to expose corruption in Africa. It has identified the middlemen who facilitate corrupt payments; it has traced the money trail from British oil traders to luxury boutiques in Paris.

And where was Scotland Yard while all this mischief was being exposed? Brown’s response, a month before he became prime minister last year, was to “deplore the activities of so-called vulture funds”.

Compare that to the remarks of Brice Mackosso, a Congolese citizen who campaigns for transparency in the handling of the country’s oil wealth. “If it were not for these vulture funds we would not know any facts about the way our country’s wealth is being taken away,” he said.

In June last year, a consortium of three French anti-corruption groups filed a civil complaint in Paris alleging the ruling families of Angola, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville had acquired millions of euros worth of French assets that they could not have afforded on their official salaries.

The case was dismissed in November but not before a resulting police investigation accumulated hundreds of documents, including property titles, cheques, bank orders and invoices. Among them was evidence that earlier this year, the wife and son of Sassou-Nguesso bought separate flats on the same street near the Boulevard Saint-Germain for a total of £3.6m.

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I'd just like to say well done to the Hedge Fund teams and all those organisation that exposed these evil people - they had done a great job in exposing corruption of some of the richest people from one of the poorest countries in the world. When things like this happen you do wonder why international governments don't use powers to flush out these people. Maybe oil is the key word?

As for the UK government and international celebrates promoting Africa to be debt free so that it could have a fresh start - this is a good idea but we really do need to control those that exploit the countries from within.

Ethiopia committing war crimes - says HRW

Taken from Yahoo News, 12 June 2008
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, Associated Press

NAIROBI, Kenya - Ethiopia's government is committing war crimes in its military campaign against rebels in the Ogaden region, a rights group charged Thursday in a report that complained the U.S. and other Western governments have remained silent about abuses.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said Ethiopian troops are beating and strangling civilians, staging public executions and burning villages in Ogaden. It said the allegations were based on more than 100 eyewitness accounts.

An Ethiopian official denied the charges.

A State Department spokesman, Gonzalo Gallegos, said officials had not seen the report. He declined to comment generally about the insurgency in the Ogaden.

Washington looks to Ethiopia for help in the fight against Islamic extremists in East Africa, where al-Qaida has claimed responsibility for several attacks, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 225 people. Ethiopia is helping the U.N.-backed government in neighboring Somalia against Muslim insurgents.

"The silence of the U.S. government is not a silence based on ignorance," said Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. "They are ignoring the information available to them."

Ethnic Somalis have been fighting for more than a decade seeking greater autonomy in the desolate Ogaden, which is being explored for oil and gas. Ethiopian forces stepped up operations after rebels attacked a Chinese-run oil exploration field in April 2007, killing 74 people.

"The Ethiopian army's answer to the rebels has been to viciously attack civilians in the Ogaden," said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director for Human Rights Watch.

The group also said the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front has violated humanitarian law by conducting the oil attack and by setting land mines along roads. Ethiopia accuses the rebels of being financed by its archenemy, Eritrea.

Bereket Simon, special adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, denied all allegations in the report.

"It's not true," he said. "It's the same old fabrication."

Asked whether an internal investigation was planned, he said: "How can we investigate lies and innuendoes? How can we try to disprove lies by investigating?"

Gagnon chided Ethiopia's leading donors, including the United States, Britain and the European Union, accusing them of ignoring what is happening in Ogaden.

"These widespread and systematic atrocities amount to crimes against humanity," she said. "Yet Ethiopia's major donors, Washington, London and Brussels, seem to be maintaining a conspiracy of silence around the crimes."

Gagnon said Western governments and institutions give at least $2 billion in aid to Ethiopia every year.

"Influential states use many excuses, such as lack of information and strategic priorities, to downplay the grave human rights concerns in Somali Region," she said. "But crimes against humanity can't be swept under the carpet."

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It is sad that the Ethopian regime does not get regular mention of their war crimes in the news (let alone from our politicians) - it seems that certain news pieces have a higher agenda than others. Another case where Oil is more important than people? or maybe a case like Israel where human rights crimes are ignored as Ethopia (like Israel) is a friend of the west. Looks like more double standards by the United States, Britain and the European Union.

US issues threat to Iraq's $50bn foreign reserves in military deal

Taken from Independent, UK
By Patrick Cockburn, 06 June 2008

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.

Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq's independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new "strategic alliance" with the United States.

The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July. Although it is in reality a treaty between Iraq and the US, Mr Bush is describing it as an alliance so he does not have to submit it for approval to the US Senate.

Iraqi critics of the agreement say that it means Iraq will be a client state in which the US will keep more than 50 military bases. American forces will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens and conduct military campaigns without consultation with the Iraqi government.

American soldiers and contractors will enjoy legal immunity.

The US had previously denied it wanted permanent bases in Iraq, but American negotiators argue that so long as there is an Iraqi perimeter fence, even if it is manned by only one Iraqi soldier, around a US installation, then Iraq and not the US is in charge.

The US has security agreements with many countries, but none are occupied by 151,000 US soldiers as is Iraq. The US is not even willing to tell the government in Baghdad what American forces are entering or leaving Iraq, apparently because it fears the government will inform the Iranians, said an Iraqi source.

The fact that Iraq's financial reserves, increasing rapidly because of the high price of oil, continue to be held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is another legacy of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein. Under the UN mandate, oil revenues must be placed in the Development Fund for Iraq which is in the bank.

The funds are under the control of the Iraqi government, though the US Treasury has strong influence on the form in which the reserves are held.

Iraqi officials say that, last year, they wanted to diversify their holdings out of the dollar, as it depreciated, into other assets, such as the euro, more likely to hold their value. This was vetoed by the US Treasury because American officials feared it would show lack of confidence in the dollar.

Iraqi officials say the consequence of the American action was to lose Iraq the equivalent of $5bn. Given intense American pressure on a weak Iraqi government very dependent on US support, it is still probable that the agreement will go through with only cosmetic changes. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the immensely influential Shia cleric, could prevent the pact by issuing a fatwa against it but has so far failed to do so.

The Grand Ayatollah met Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which is the main supporter of the Iraqi government, earlier this week and did not condemn the agreement or call for a referendum. He said, according to Mr Hakim, that it must guarantee Iraqi national sovereignty, be transparent, command a national consensus and be approved by the Iraqi parliament. Critics of the deal fear that the government will sign the agreement, and parliament approve it, in return for marginal concessions.

Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control

Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors

Taken from The Independent, UK
By Patrick Cockburn, 05 June 2008

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.

The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.

The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."

Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.

The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.

Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.

The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.

The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.

The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

Taken from The Guardian, Monday June 2 2008
Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.


An amphibious assault vehicle leaves the USS Peleliu, which was used to detain prisoners, according to the human rights group Reprieve. Photograph: Zack Baddor/AP

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were "disappeared" to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

"By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been 'through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them."

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, called for the US and UK governments to come clean over the holding of detainees.

"Little by little, the truth is coming out on extraordinary rendition. The rest will come, in time.

Better for governments to be candid now, rather than later. Greater transparency will provide increased confidence that President Bush's departure from justice and the rule of law in the aftermath of September 11 is being reversed, and can help to win back the confidence of moderate Muslim communities, whose support is crucial in tackling dangerous extremism."

The Liberal Democrat's foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: "If the Bush administration is using British territories to aid and abet illegal state abduction, it would amount to a huge breach of trust with the British government. Ministers must make absolutely clear that they would not support such illegal activity, either directly or indirectly."

A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, told the Guardian: "There are no detention facilities on US navy ships." However, he added that it was a matter of public record that some individuals had been put on ships "for a few days" during what he called the initial days of detention. He declined to comment on reports that US naval vessels stationed in or near Diego Garcia had been used as "prison ships".

The Foreign Office referred to David Miliband's statement last February admitting to MPs that, despite previous assurances to the contrary, US rendition flights had twice landed on Diego Garcia. He said he had asked his officials to compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

CIA "black sites" are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

In addition, numerous prisoners have been "extraordinarily rendered" to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.